From: ichudov@algebra.com
Date: Fri, 14 Feb 1997 15:58:03 -0800 (PST)
To: Vin McLellan <vin@shore.net>
Subject: Re: Good Bye Cypherpunks!
Message-ID: <199702142358.PAA18139@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Vin McLellan wrote:
> 
>         It's always interesting  to see how another person, particularly a
> writer, filters and reshapes an experience you shared with them .
> Differences in the telling are inevitable -- but I perceived the recent
> experience of the C'punks List quite differently than what Declan described
> and implied in his column.
> 
>         My understanding of Sandy's effort, for instance, was that he was to
> filter out the sludge of spam and contentless name-calling with which some
> idiots were flooding the list.  My impression was that he was passing along
> any posts with content (ideas, pro or con, on almost anything) but filtering
> out the empty obscene name-calling and slurs (many of which seemed anon or
> forged, with varied and misleading titles, to duck my kill-file filters.)

May I ask you, what is the basis of "your understanding"?

Did you form your impression upon reading only the materials from
the list that was filtered by Sandy? Or you also read the flames and
unedited lists?

In the latter case, you have no basis for any claims regarding Sandy's
policy.

I do have a list of subscribers to the unedited list, and you were not
on it.

>         I, for one, was appreciative. 

>         By the logic of Tim and others, a clever and dedicated crusade
> against Cypherpunks by any minimally-organized group, bir or small -- your
> local coven, CoS, RC bishops, FBI, Romanian Govt, , whomever!  -- could have
> destroyed the List at any time in the past. 

But of course.

> I'm glad they never realized
> how vulnerable we were;  I've enjoyed this Community greatly  in its current
> manifestation. 

Maybe they realized it and were not really bothered by this list because
of this lameness. What if all these anti-government rants were just
feeding the illusion of grandeur.

>          I also hate to think of how gleeful the sociopaths who mail-bombed
> us into the choice of submission or suicide must be today.  I think it is a
> particularly henious crime to destroy a virtual community; something akin to
> book-burning, but maybe more like arson -- like burning village schools.  

It is because you wanted to take everything from them.

>     There was a willful attempt to destroy C'punks, an attack of depth and
> volume which led many of us (even those who had ignored at least three
> earlier efforts to offer filtered subsets to the List)  to welcome the
> Moderation Experiment. Unfortunately, the attempt at moderation just twisted
> our own energies against ourselves.  We were, perhaps predictably, quite
> easy to manipulate.

It is a question of what you think is manipulation.

>         If I have any criticism of John et al, it is that our List-Owner (a
> statement of function, rather than property) never gave the List Community
> an overt option to vote for  minimal moderation.  A tactical error.  That
> that allowed the anarchists, nihlists, and others pure of heart to focus
> their ire on toad.com and Sandy -- rather than on those of us who (when John
> finally acted) might have gladly re-subscribed to another version of the
> List in order to obtain minimal spam and slur filtration.  

Yes, if moderation created a new place in cyberspace, it would have been
less controversial.

	- Igor.